chology to develop ideas about how customers frame and evaluate their interactions with a service and recover when they fail. Experience design has drawn from disciplines ranging from art to marketing to develop frames for how people experience products. In the past 30 years, both service design and experience design have advanced from the application of qualitative, user-centered design methods to understand the problems that we are designing for. Experience design led to new methods such as experience prototyping, or acting out the social and intangible aspects of product use [ 6]; service design has become fascinated with participatory methods, probably because services are co-created by businesses and consumers at the time of their consumption [ 1].

Designing both for experi-
ence and for the completion
of a service is approached
improvisationally and holisti-
cally. Instead of designing a
concrete experience or service
transaction, designers cre-
ate resources or levers for
establishing an experience or
enacting a service, with the
understanding that people’s
subjective perceptions, atti-
tudes, actions, and beliefs will
ultimately shape the outcomes.
While a service blueprint—a
process diagram for orchestrat-
ing all of the components of a
service—is indigenous to ser-
vice design, other interaction
design methods such as user
enactments, storytelling, map-
ping, and modeling are useful
both in experience design and
service design. Additionally,
the interaction design com-
munity is evolving the service-
design blueprint, to attempt
to combine blueprinting with
personas and use cases [ 7], cus-
tomer-centered views of service
design [ 8], improvisation in
art, dance, and drama [ 9], the
emotional state of a customer
[ 10], and changes in services
and customers as information
about customer preferences is
gathered over time [ 11].

service is transactional, helping a customer to achieve a goal. Experience, however, encompasses a much larger set of conditions: our everyday, moment-to-moment experience, understanding the world by comparing it with what we find familiar, and understanding changes in people and contexts of product use over longer periods of time—even a lifetime. Experience has been described as one person or a group of people using a product; service design is framed as a journey with touchpoints. Experience designers represent aspects of experience design through description, frameworks, and models, while service designers create a service blueprint as a process diagram to represent all of the aspects of a service design [ 4].

But then, Again Upon deeper consideration, one can argue there are some substantial differences between experience design and service design. One of the biggest differences is that a

“Difference” as a Concept Perhaps it is superfluous to reignite an old discussion in the interaction design community. Rather than waging turf wars to articulate the differences between experience design and service design, designers should instead spend time working on how to more

[ 6] Buchenau, M. and Fulton Suri, J. “Experience Prototyping.” Proceedings of DIS00, 424–433. New York: ACM Press, 2000.

[ 7] Morelli, N. “Designing Product/ Service Systems: A Methodological Exploration.” Design Issues 18 (2002): 3–17.

[ 8] Pinhanez, C. “ Service as Customer-intensive Systems.” Design Issues 25, 2 (2009): 3–13.

[ 9] Mager, B. and Evenson, S. “The Art of Service: Drawing on the Arts to Inform Service Design and Specification.” In Service Science: Research and Innovations in the Service Economy, eds. Hefley, B. and Murphy, W. London: Springer, 2008.

[ 10] Spraragen, S. and Chan, C. (2008). “Service Blueprinting: When Customer Satisfaction Numbers Are Not Enough.” International DMI Education Conference. Design Thinking: Ne w Challenges for Designers, Managers and Organizations, available on CD-rom.

[ 11] Lee, M. K. and Forlizzi, J. “Designing Adaptive Robotic Services.” Proceedings of IASDR09. New York, N Y: ACM Press, 2009.

Influences
Consumer and cognitive psychology; some
studies of organizations
Art, philosophy, rhetoric, marketing,
participatory design
Methods
Qualitative, user-centered design methods;
simulation and modeling, (inspired by operations
management); storytelling, blueprinting,
mapping, and modeling
Qualitative, user-centered design
methods; storytelling; modeling
Approaches
Focused mainly on transactions
Understanding how people use products,
and the experience that results
September + October 2010

Key concepts Serving, character of service, co-production,

co-experience

• Summary of key factors in a comparison of service design and experience design.

Values, experience, an experience,
co-experience
interactions